To her surprise, Freda’s thoughts strayed unexpectedly to, and then landed and settled on, Margaret Clitherow, a Catholic martyr in York who had been pressed to death—she had been laid beneath a door and then large stones had been piled on top of the door. Freda only knew this story because the Ingrams were Catholic. In her experience, only Catholics tended to be interested in martyrs. The door was from Margaret Clitherow’s own house, an odd detail that had always interested Freda. She would have preferred to have been smothered by a front door, any front door, than the elephantine bulk of Owen Varley.
“Come on, now,” he spluttered as he grappled with her clothes. Freda could feel his fat, cold fingers fumbling all over her, places he shouldn’t go. Mr. Birdwhistle’s assault on her defences seemed paltry compared to this. She was violated, Freda thought, a word that she hadn’t previously known was in her vocabulary.
“Be a good girl,” Owen Varley grunted. He sounded as though he was choking.
One of them would die. He would either have a heart attack as he groaned and convulsed as if in pain, or Freda would suffocate from the lack of air. A martyr to fame and fortune.
Freda summoned every last shred of strength and snapped her teeth onto her offender’s fleshy jowls, like a dog. And like a dog she hung on, even though she was gagging with disgust.
Owen Varley squealed—as well as a man can squeal when his jaw is clamped between a girl’s teeth—and tried to pull away from her, but still Freda hung on. If she could have done, she would have torn his face off, but eventually she had to let go. Owen Varley crumpled heavily onto the floor and lay still. Had she killed him? Could you kill someone by biting them?
Run, Freda thought, run and don’t look back. Run for your life. She had the presence of mind to grab Vanda’s bag—her portfolio of photographs had been thrown to the floor, she didn’t care about retrieving them, but she was not going to sacrifice their money or Mrs. Ingram’s jewels to Owen Varley.
No thread to guide her back out of the maze, Freda had no idea how she found her way out of the theatre, but she did. She sprinted past the stage doorman, past the surprised snake of fresh hopefuls on Maiden Lane. She was close to Corpus Christi church. Freda knew you could seek sanctuary in a church, but she preferred the safe haven of the Lyons on Coventry Street, where Florence was waiting for her.
* * *
—
Freda regarded herself in the mirror of the Ladies’ in the Lyons. She had rinsed her mouth out many times, but she was sure she could still taste Owen Varley’s blood. She looked a fright. Her comb was in her handbag and the best she could do was splash her face with cold water and smooth her hair down with her hands.
“Are you all right, dear?” the elderly Ladies’ attendant asked her solicitously.
“Yes, perfectly all right, thank you,” Freda said. The attendant’s kindness made her want to cry all over again and she would have left a tip for the woman, but her money, thank goodness, was safely in her handbag, on a chair next to Florence. Imagine if she had left it in the Adelphi—she would never have been able to return for it. Florence would keep a guardian eye on it. Wouldn’t she? Freda experienced a sudden sense of overwhelming dread and, gripped by an awful panic, she ran back into the body of the café, where a commotion was occurring. One of the nippies was shouting, “Thief!” and many of the patrons were on their feet, as if they were at a spectator sport.
The excitement was already beginning to die down by the time Freda reached their table. People had resumed their seats, returned to their pots of tea. It was not their loss.
“They took your bag,” Florence said miserably when she saw her.
“They? They who?”
“Thieves. Women.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Freda asked. She was cold, almost frozen with anger. How could Florence have been so careless as to take her eye off the bag? How could she have been so stupid?
Florence’s lip started quivering. “It wasn’t my fault. It was you that ran off and left your bag, Freda. I knew you’d blame me.”
“Yes, I do!” Freda said. “You are a stupid, ignorant donkey, Florence! I would be much better off without you!”
The Invisible Man
Frobisher loitered at the end of the street, coat collar up, hat brim down, aware that he must look rather furtive to anyone watching him. Frobisher, however, prided himself on being good at blending into the background, like H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man. It would have surprised him to learn, therefore, that in fact he was himself being observed—by a man holding a small notebook that looked similar, nay identical, to the kind of police-issue notebooks that were doled out from the supplies cupboard that was in turn fiercely policed by a grey-haired shrew of a senior clerk in his own station at Bow Street. A new pencil was not granted until the stub of the old one was presented. Frobisher admired economy but disliked parsimony. He thought he might have a word with her, but she was low down on his list of priorities. Unless somehow she, too, was in the pay of the nightclub owners of Soho.
Frobisher had, in fact, been under this surveillance since the previous day, when the owner of the little notebook had been engaged to spy on him. The notebook already contained a plethora of jottings so banal that if Frobisher had been privy to them he would have been dismayed (although not surprised) at the mundanity of his life.
JOHN FROBISHER left house in Ealing 6:20 (a.m.), arrived Bow Street at 7:45 (a.m.). 12:00 p.m. Frobisher left Bow Street at midday, walked around Soho/Covent Garden. Ate lunch (ham and chips) in Jonnie’s in Floral Street.
The notebook was snapped shut and pocketed.
* * *
—
Nearly every night since starting at Bow Street, Frobisher had come down here to monitor the many comings and goings at the Amethyst. A seemingly endless procession of people, intent on indulgence, made their way through the doors of the nightclub. The war had made people hedonistic, and yet you would have thought it would have had the opposite effect, that people would be relieved to embrace the calm sobriety of peace. Frobisher had never understood the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself. A belief, he supposed, that made him stuffy in the eyes of others. He believed in a moderate life—he was not a Puritan, but he was pained by the extremes of behaviour he found himself witness to. There was enough of that in Ealing.
Now, of course, there was a new restlessness in the air. He supposed it was all this talk of a General Strike, as if London did not have enough to cope with as it was. Not that he was without sympathy for the workers. The war had undone them in many ways. They were living in a dystopia.
He was hoping to catch Maddox entering the Amethyst. There must be a second secret entrance somewhere. Frobisher had looked, of course, but so far had failed to find it. No one in Bow Street would admit to knowing its location, but he suspected that they all did.
A girl, more wraith than girl, stepped into the circle of weak light cast from a lamppost further down the street. Thirteen? Fourteen? Fifteen? It was impossible to say. She was doll-like with blonde ringlets, rickety legs. The spangles on her cheap dress caught the light of the streetlight. Restless, nervous even, she kept looking around as if expecting someone. Frobisher was about to break cover and approach her and tell her to run home and not to linger in places like this, but then a cab drew up, disgorging a group of noisy, excited Bacchants, and by the time they were inside the club the ethereal figure of the girl had melted back into the night.
He watched and waited. Finally Miss Kelling and Cobb arrived. Was Cobb the right man for this job? Frobisher had his doubts, but Cobb was keen and seemingly sensible—a word that had appeared to irk Miss Kelling for some reason.
Cobb—a skinny streak of a man—was even less prepossessing out of uniform. He was wearing an evening suit that was a size too large and the cost of its hire had come from Bow Street funds. Miss Kelling perhaps deserved better.
Reluctantly, Frobisher made his way to the Tube station. Perhaps, after all, he did understand why people stayed out carousing until the early hours. It meant they didn’t have to go home.
* * *